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Research Services

information technology services

Purchase of Equipment and adding it to the Cluster

We encourage researchers to write grants to purchase nodes (or other appropriate hardware) that can be added to the cluster. Buying equipment and adding it to the Cluster gives researchers access to a larger system than they could buy independently, counts as part of Boston College's match to the grant, and removes system administration responsibilities from researchers allowing them to focus on their work. It also gives the entire Boston College community access to a larger resource.

We have some general guidelines for adding equipment to the Cluster. We hope these are common sense guidelines.

The equipment must be relatively new and similar to, and compatible with, existing equipment. We will work with researchers on specifications. These specifications may include disk, in addition to nodes.

The equipment will be integrated into the cluster and managed for 3 years. After 2.5 years, we will review the equipment to determine if it is still current, usable and manageable in the cluster to determine if it still should be part of the cluster after the end of the three years.

The researcher's group will get the equivalent of these resources on the entire cluster, and will have access to all nodes on the cluster. This permits the research group to run more jobs than they could on their nodes alone, and gives general users access to a larger cluster. We will configure the queues so that the jobs of the researcher's group gets top priority until the equivalent of the number of nodes purchased is exceeded.

To accommodate deadlines, and special requests, we will dedicate the equivalent number of nodes to the research group; however, we need advanced notice, as it will take time to clear running jobs.